It’s assumed that you already have a pear tree; the partridges are just being installed into your pre-existing tree. Don’t be greedy. Mature fruit trees are expensive.

replacing First-past-the-post voting in your state

Yeah, well, incidentally, ranked choice voting was on the ballot in 2020. We had a sign out encouraging people to vote for it, and I talked it up to whomever it would listen when political discourse came up, but it didn’t pass, so here we still are.

Voting should be an absolutely minor thing in the totality of your political actions. Join, start, or support a union. Find what mutual aids groups are nearby, and participate. Join protests. Pressure your local politicians. Support your comrades in their direct action campaigns. Build political power that is under your control, not the control of a system invented in the 1700s by a bunch of wealthy white slaveowners.

Totally with you!

Voted PSL, and yah, I am terrified.

Ah, you lost me. You see a problem, but you seem to be unwilling to accept that there are incremental steps to solving that problem, and the first step is to make sure Trump loses this election. If you aren’t doing everything you can to effect that result, you are, to put it simply, fucking up.

To support the Democratic party is to actively decide to place less value on the lives of non-Americans

Netanyahu wants Trump to win, and with good reason. Harris might not have good policy with regards to Israel / Palestine, but Trump’s is indisputably worse, if you aren’t staunchly pro-Israel. Furthermore, Harris is better in pretty much every measurable metric including climate change, where Trump’s “Burn it all down” policy would doom us all.

To be clear, if I was going to be a single issue voter, climate change would be that issue, not foreign policy, because if we fuck that one up, everyone loses.

It’s cool, though - I’m sure the people dying in Gaza if Trump wins will understand that you couldn’t vote for “better” because it wasn’t “perfect”. Your 12-16 year plan for change will surely make them feel better about their situation, when Trump is encouraging Israel to do whatever they need to to end the conflict quickly.

It’s like that story about the family that moved to Russia and said “We didn’t think it would be so hard to live in Russia when we didn’t speak Russian!”

That’s some master-class mental gymnastics. Go vote. Jesus fucking Christ.

I wonder if those folks who cast a protest vote for Jill Stein will be sleeping soundly tonight… I sure hope not. I hope they’re fucking terrified.

If you’re in the mood for something that takes a bit longer to solve, Redactle is a fun one.

There’s no real difference between $213 billion and $270 billion when it comes to buying power. Both are effectively unlimited. Both could buy small countries if they wanted to. But there sure is a difference when it comes to ego, because when we talk about it, we’re always treating it like a great thing to be the richest person in the world, instead of sociopathy.

As long as we keep treating wealth like a scoreboard, this will continue. If we collectively demonized people with unreasonable wealth, ostracized them from society, and stopped glorifying it and treating them like celebrities because of it, we might be in a better spot.

Every time you look at the app, they share the time you’re seeing with every other user, it’s a privacy nightmare!

You’re the hero the internet needs.

Yeah, and at that point I’ll also just wait for a 50% off sale, whereas I would otherwise have been a day 1 purchase.

I feel like this happens a lot, honestly - there’ll be a game I’m really excited for, and either it’s got some shitty DRM, or it’s a timed Epic exclusive, or whatever else, and then a few months later when I could be playing it, I’ve mentally moved on to other things and I end up just buying it much later on deep sale if at all.

There’s a lot of games coming out all the time; if I get past that initial hype period around launch without buying a thing, it’s 50% or more off, or I won’t buy it at all.

It’s really a shame, because I was super excited for MH:Wilds, but the confirmation that it will include Denuvo killed my enthusiasm completely.

if you have a more effective metric in mind, I’d love to hear it instead of just pointing out flaws

I mean, isn’t the whole point of this comment section to discuss the merits and flaws of the proposal you’ve made? If we’re not discussing the downsides, too, what’s even the point?

That said, an ideal system would be a measure of the quality of content, not the quantity of content so, as another user has suggested, some measure involving net upvotes might be more effective. Yes, obviously a user can create multiple accounts to upvote everything and fuck with that metric, but I kind of doubt many folks would go to the trouble.

Maybe some combination of PCM and the average number of votes divided by the number of active users could generate some sort of quality metric. At the very least it might be a measure of engagement.

Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.

Isn’t this actually just spam encouragement? A community with a bot that posts 50 low-value posts every day will have a much higher PCM as a result, and that behavior is more obnoxious to users and moderators who have to see it and deal with it, vs. someone creating a bunch of accounts, which is largely invisible to everyone else.

The geography is also a huge contributor. To protest something on a national scale needs significantly greater buy-in from the country as a whole than protesting something on a national scale in a European country. We have a huge amount of land area over here and with the exception of major cities, we’re very spread out.

Spain is one of the larger European countries, and is about 500k sq. km, as an example. The US is about 9.1 million sq. km.

Protests happen on local scales but they don’t make national news, only the really massive ones do, and those require a lot of coordination and time investment from the participants just to show up.

It’s all just framing, no? You could frame all of your examples of protesting to “improve something” as protesting against something, and vice versa.

Protesting for improved living conditions is just protesting against poor living conditions. Protesting for higher wages is protesting against low wages. Protesting for lower tuition costs is protesting against high tuition.

Protests by definition are an action objecting to a thing. What are you seeing happen in other countries that’s so different to what’s happening here, when you don’t selectively frame it as “for” a cause rather than “against” a thing?

This is kind of up to the individual community, not the instance as a whole. An instance theoretically could make a general ‘No memes on any community on this instance’ rule but it would be awful to enforce, and it’d be easier to leave it up to communities.

That said, I think Lemmy is a long way off from having the userbase or popularity to create that problem, and the absence of karma or any analogue really narrows the impact. Personally, I’ve seen significantly less low-effort content here than on Reddit, with the exception of a few specific communities that exist for that purpose specifically.

This is the shit government should be working to correct, if they weren’t all in it for the money just as much as the corporations.

Corporations and the general population have an innately antagonistic relationship. Corporations want to make as much money as possible, the general population wants to spend as little as possible, so their goals are diametrically opposed. (I’m pooling Uber drivers in with the general population here, because they’re in the same position - being opposed to Uber’s goals.)

Corporations inherently hold more power in this relationship; they have more money than even large groups of individuals, so they can hire expensive teams of lawyers and accountants and professionals of all kinds to further their goals, while it’s difficult if not impossible for normal folks to organize against a corporation in any meaningful way.

In a system that worked, the government would be working to protect the population from corporate interests. They’d be spending the bulk of their time identifying and closing loopholes like this one, and enacting laws to make exploiting these loopholes not worth it, and generally would be the arm of the people.

Instead, corporations pay government, and the government looks the other way - if not directly supports them - while they fuck over everyone they can - and the planet, while they’re at it -to reap wealth. And this shit is the result.

I’d actually be interested to see a cost breakdown between this and just buying a newspaper subscription; it looks like he spent about $100 on materials, plus then there’s the ongoing costs of electricity (negligible), printer ribbons, and paper. Ribbons appear to be about $1 / ea if you buy in bulk, and I don’t recall how much printing you get out of a single ribbon, but let’s assume a 24 pack is enough to last you a year. Paper seems to be about $30 / 1000 sheets, so assuming he sticks to the single-page-per-day format, that’ll last almost 3 years.

So up front costs, $100 Ongoing costs, $35 / year, roughly.

Newspaper subscription is about $150 / year, so this’ll actually be cost effective if he keeps it up. Of course, you’re getting a lot less news than you would from a newspaper subscription, so the relative value is questionable there.